Status-Q

The fact that I have both an iPod Touch and a Nokia E61 in my pocket means that, over the last year or two, I've come to assume that I can find out almost anything wherever I am. At lunch today, out in the garden, the word 'sardonic' came up in conversation, and I wondered about its etymology. Could it have something to do with Sardinia? Was the population of the island once noted for its cynicism? Here's the answer, by the way, which was trivial to find out while sipping a glass of Rioja in the sunshine.

This is made much easier since most of the places I go to look things up are now easily-accessible icons on my iTouch screen:

Another example - Rose has decided, after avoiding clothes shopping as much as possible for the last couple of decades, to do a little catching up. But she won't buy anything without my encouragement and approval, especially since prices seem to have risen somewhat in that period.

The upshot is that I've spent a lot of time in the "husband's chair" in women's clothing stores recently, and have been grateful for having the web at my fingertips. In one store today, I liked the music that was playing, and by typing a few words of the lyrics into Google was able to discover the name of the song and artist. What's more, since the Apple Store opposite had wifi, I was able to buy and download a copy of the song from iTunes before Rose came out of the fitting room. All without getting out of the chair. All without using a PC - in fact simply using the kit in the pockets of my shorts.

And I pondered just how fast the world had changed.

My friend Phil Endecott has a webcam in the bird box on the side of his house, where some bluetits have made their nest.

You can see them here, where you'll also find a great sequence of photos and movies of some of the more exciting moments in their lives so far.

Great stuff.

We're looking for software people - we've had a lot of good candidates already, so that one is going to close very shortly - but we're also now looking for a Sales & Marketing Director who'll have a very significant role in the business.

More info here.

Roger McGuinn, partly in an effort to save some old folk tunes from being lost, has released a number of recordings for free at FolkDen.com, under a Creative Commons licence.

Many of them are really quite good, if you like that kind of thing. I keep finding myself humming Blow the Man Down after listening to his recording, for example. Recommended.

Wow - this is a cool story!

Many thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.

Mac users will appreciate these poster designs.

Following on from my previous post about dull politicians, I'm glad to see that Boris Johnson got off to a good start.

He denounced as ridiculous the lights at Trafalgar Square. ""They are red for one minute 45 seconds and go green for only 12 seconds!"" He vowed to fix this as the audience shouted ""Yeah! Yeah!"".

I'm one of those people who has no idea how many free texts I get on my phone, because I never get anywhere close to the limit.

It may be something to do with getting into the Blackberry thing early, so it's always just been cheaper for me to send emails. Or it may be that I just never really like small keyboards, so while I read a great deal on my phone, I don't write very much (despite my E61 having a nice QWERTY keyboard).

When I do want to send a text to someone, I often go to my laptop and right-click on their name in Address Book because it's just so much easier to send it by Skype.

Anyway, what prompted me to post was the discovery that my mother is changing her phone plan because 100 texts a month aren't enough for her. I probably don't send that many in a year! So am I way uncool, or is it cooler not to be sending texts now that my Mum is being so prolific? How many texts do you send?

If you run any Ubuntu or Debian systems, or have users who do, you should read this if you don't already know about the OpenSSL security bug. I fear it's going to be important.